Blogs

Digital Asset Management is a process for the structural organization, storage, and retrieval of rich media assets and management of permissions and rights. In simpler terms, DAM systems facilitate organizations to create, edit, share and organize their digital assets. Types of digital assets include images, audios, videos, animations, documents and other multimedia content.

In this blog post, we’ll examine some challenges that exist in testing DAM systems.

Metadata is king of content

Metadata can be referred to as a set of data that provides information about data. It plays a vital role in managing and finding digital assets, especially when these are dispersed in the system. With an increased volume of digital assets, adding relevant metadata to every individual or group of assets for easy retrieval is critical.

While metadata can improve the efficiency of the organization in placing assets, ensuring that the expected asset is returned when a user searches for it, with keywords, becomes paramount. Our experience, made us list down a few challenges that functional testers should be aware of while testing the system for readiness:

Usage of common metadata across assets tend to provide inappropriate and inaccurate results while searching for digital assets

Lack of understanding of metadata used by the end users could lead to inaccuracy

For localization, understanding how the end user uses search using contextual keywords becomes a challenge

Large data set and Response time matters

With the ever-growing data and data sets, the need of the hour is to store all the user-generated data appropriately. Typically, the end users manage assets in a DAM system which varies in ‘Number of assets’ and ‘Volume of assets’. So, testing the scalability and performance of the system with large data sets plays a vital role in determining the consistency of the application. Replicating end-user behavior to simulate workflows with variety, volume, and velocity of data sets becomes a challenging task for testers.

Personas and end-user workflows

A “Persona” is an imaginary representation of an actual end user. Personas play a vital role in design decisions of the product, hence are identified in the early stages of product development. Identifying personas and user workflows help the team members to share a common understanding of the end user group who use the product.

Test cases designed by considering various persons and workflows could help in identifying potential challenge an end user might face.

Omni-channel and Compatibility

With digitization comes the need for increased acceptance of Omni-channel. While ensuring that new product features are continuously released to outsmart the competition, it is imperative to ensure that the product is compatible with all the distribution channels and their versions.

Take an example of users that consume mobile data. The user experience could be impacted not only by the functionality of the application but also by other factors including different sizes of screens, types of networks, WIFI, different OS versions used, localization, internalization, utilization of mobile resources such as RAM, battery power for the Mobile application under test. Based on the requirements, testing the application and its functions satisfying all the criteria across different devices, platforms, and environments, is much needed. Typical test approach should consider cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility and data synchronization testing techniques to ensure the application performs consistently.

User roles and permissions

Ensuring that end users data is stored in a secure location and the access to the information is restricted is paramount to any digital asset management system.

Considering, Users as people, Roles as functions and Permissions as access rights to functions – only intended users of the system should be able to access the functions of the application. As more and more platforms move towards multi-tenant application, feature bleed is an area for testing to watch out for. A feature designed as per the requirement of one tenant should be accessed by the authorized tenant only.

As an example, an update made for one tenant may not be available or may not be a requirement for another tenant. So, every change/update to the system has to be carefully tested, such that, it doesn’t affect the working features for every user role. As every user would have different privileges associated, it is necessary to perform access control and multi-privilege tests to ensure that the data of one tenant isn’t accessible by another tenant.

Conclusion

A test approach designed with above considerations is fundamental for the successful development of Digital Asset Management platforms. With asset factory coverage of 100+ asset types, 500+ prebuilt test cases ZenQ has supported clients across the world for their implementation and continues testing needs.

ZenQ, an ISO 27001:2013 certified, SOC II compliant organization, is a leading provider of pure-play software testing services to clients across the globe. We offer a comprehensive range of value-added testing solutions that are of the highest quality and efficiency that help our customers build quality products.